America’s population and economy are both growing, yet its energy appetite is falling. That’s because of substantial energy-efficiency gains made in recent decades.
Those gains are helping the country reduce oil imports, save money on power bills, and move toward meeting agoal set by President Obama of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent between 2005 and 2020.
The news is laid out in a Natural Resources Defense Council report cheerily titled America’s (Amazingly) Good Energy News [PDF]:
[O]ver the past 40 years Americans have found so many innovative ways to save energy that we have more than doubled the economic productivity of the oil that runs our vehicles and the natural gas and electricity that runs almost everything else. Factories and businesses are producing substantially more products and value with less energy. …
[B]ecause increasing efficiency is far less costly than adding other energy resources like fossil fuels, this is saving the nation hundreds of billions of dollars annually, helping U.S. workers and companies compete worldwide, and making our country more energy-secure.
America’s energy use peaked in 2007 and has been falling ever since, the report says. Less energy was used by Americans last year than in 1999, despite 25 percent economic growth in the intervening years.
My video on efficiency, the first of two, is below. If you’re pressed, skip to 7.09 for the relevant punchline.
What nice magical thinking.
Just how is it that those jobs are created with less energy? What are those jobs? Are they washing cloths on scrubber boards at the river bank? Are they gathering burnable rubbish for cooking? Or carrying water in buckets to fill the tub?
It’s absolutely true that electricity displaces jobs by doing the work for us.
BTW, Jimmy Carter, which did that White House solar system become? A curiosity or a museum piece?
If you reduce the cost of moving goods around via efficiency, then the price of those goods decreases, and that increases demand for those goods. Increased demand for goods creates jobs.
Walmart knows this; that’s why they want more efficient tractor trailer trucks.
Economists that see a correlation between oil price spikes and economic recessions know this also. Imagine a world where there are no volatile swings in the price of energy. Such increases economic stability, ensuring job holders stay in their jobs longer which then nourishes steady and predictable demand for goods and services, and reduces the risk for investing in business ventures (less risk equals less cost) that are sensitive to demand volatility. There are plenty of positive feedback mechanisms to be had with energy efficiency regarding jobs and the economy.
If you follow Amory Lovins, his engineering consulting firm walks the talk – they reduce energy use in buildings and industry, often with 3 year paybacks (after three years, it’s all profit, which can then be utilized to grow the business and create more jobs, etc.). Energy consulting industry is poised for a break out, again creating jobs.
What did Dr. Rahmstorf say on the other video about the oil industry investing 500+ billion dollars per year in oil exploration? I would almost bet if you graphed a chart on ‘exploration cost’ versus ‘profitable findings’, or in other words, ‘exploration return on investment’, over a 100 year period, you would see a dramatic reduction in return on investment over time. In other words, money is being probably being sucked out of the economy and falling into a black hole that used not to be, years ago, presently to the tune of possibly tens of billions of dollars, if not hundreds of billions. This is money that could have gone to increasing demand for goods and services, again increasing jobs [consumers pay that exploration cost at the pump].
‘If you reduce the cost of moving goods around via efficiency, then the price of those goods decreases, and that increases demand for those goods. Increased demand for goods creates jobs.’
Further, if you decrease the cost of commodities, that puts more spending money in the pocket of the middle class, which then is spent on goods (and services; US is more a service based economy), and that increases service jobs and jobs that have to do with providing and making goods (sales, etc.) or the raw materials for goods.
That’s partly why republicans want ‘drill baby drill!’. What they don’t realize is ‘efficiency baby efficiency’ gives a greater, longer lasting return on the investment of capital.
Despite the increases in efficiency since 1973, the gains have not wound up in the pockets of the people creating them; the purchasing power of the average wage has been stagnant for the past 40 years, and has lately been falling. Families have been putting more of their members to work to make ends meet, but when you have all adults employed full-time that tactic runs into a brick wall… and the jobs being created lately are mostly part-time.
No, “efficiency” is not all it’s cracked up to be. If you try painting today’s jobless recovery as a road to low-energy, low-carbon utopia, you’re going to wind up with a lot of bitter critics of the artist’s vision.
No doubt efficiency measures cannot, with equal weight, counter the aggregate of larger forces at play in the realm of the economy and policy.
Still, I’m sure lots of middle class folks, part time or full time, are glad their cars are getting 25mpg (or whatever the current mean is) instead of the 13mpg of the early 1970’s, and have a few extra thousand bucks at the end of the year to pay their Obamacare tax, or super-size their Big Macs, or buy a new fishing pole, or whatever folks do with their money.
Where have efficiency measures greatly affected the cost of transporting goods? Air flight is virtually the same since the 1970s, and so is ocean, truck, and rail transport. If anything, transport costs per good have gone up – because they are travelling a lot farther now than they did in the 1970s.
Besides that, transport is a small percentage of the cost of the good itself.
What has actually happened is that corporations have dramatically cut labor costs by shipping manufacturing jobs to developing countries and by creating giant warehouses run by minimum wage employees to sell those goods. That has resulted in lower cost goods, but it has also meant fewer jobs. It has basically created the stagnant income situation we’ve found ourselves in for 4 decades.
And with dramatically rising health and education costs, and recently with rising food and energy costs, people are forced to go to the big box stores (and use debt) to stay afloat – gutting more American jobs in the form of the ‘mom and pop’ store. That forces more people to buy cheaper goods, and the process is a nasty feedback loop.
Well put. but you missed the mark a bit with this:
“Where have efficiency measures greatly affected the cost of transporting goods? Air flight is virtually the same since the 1970s, and so is ocean, truck, and rail transport”.
You are mostly correct about the costs of shipping by air, but the “container revolution” and the resulting efficiencies is one of the major reasons for the cheapness of foreign-made goods. Being able to put a container next to some factory in China and fill it with goods made by 20 cent an hour workers is only part of the story. The economies realized by the truck-train-boat-train-truck movement of those goods to your local Wal-Mart distribution warehouse is the rest of it.
I’ve had a pretty good run on my CSX stock. More and more stuff is being containerized and placed on rail (the most efficient form of long distance shipping) which is offsetting the destruction of the east coast coal industry (CSX’s traditional customers). New rail infrastructure is coming online on the east coast in response to greater demand for moving things around on containers cheap as possible.
Hmm…maybe my sentiment wasn’t comprehensive enough, regarding efficiency and cost of goods/services:
In order to make a product to sell and sell it:
-you have to pull stuff out of the ground: that takes energy
-you have to take that stuff to the refining mill: that takes energy
-you have to refine it: that takes energy
-you have to organize and store it to be shipped to other factories: that takes energy
-you have to ship it to other factories: that takes energy
-you have to fashion it into parts at the factory: that takes energy
-again you have to organize and store the parts: that takes energy
-you have to have a corporate headquarters that runs the show in both the refining and fashioning steps that occupies a building with lots of computers, air conditioners, heaters, etc.: that or those building(s) uses energy
– you have to send the parts to the assembly line – that takes energy
– you have to assemble the parts into toasters or video games: that takes energy
– again more storage, headquarters offices, organization etc. – that takes energy
– shipping to retailers’ warehouses – that takes energy
– storage, organization, etc. at the warehouse – that takes energy
– shipping to the retailers’ sales floor – that takes energy
– keeping the a/c and heat going so that shoppers are in a comfortable environment to buy stuff – that takes energy
– shipping stuff back to the warehouse or sending low-turnover stuff to a different outlet – that takes energy
– again the retailers have their own headquarter office buildings, and the sales floor buildings, chocked full of lights, computers, microwaves, copy machines, etc. – all eating energy
– not only do all those components use energy, but it takes energy to make the buildings, the sales floors, the dump trucks, the tractor trailers, etc.
So each component in itself may not add a lot of cost to the product: For example a corporate office’s energy bill is only around 1 or 2% of their cost of operation (this is why energy efficiency is easily overlooked at the business level), but the entire system’s energy cost may significantly influence the product cost (i.e. total energy related cost difference in an efficient system vs. a non-efficient system may be greater than that which influences the elasticity of the product turnover).
Every time there is a potential marginal disruption in the middle east oil supply, the stock market takes a dip, and it ain’t because the financial folks think part of the global economy will come to a grinding halt because 5% less oil is available (though part of it is just raw fear of bad news, but look at the rational behind that fear). It’s because the cost of running the system can go up and reduce demand for products/services.
Great video, as always.
Perhaps you will mention it in part two, but a significant factor in the reduction of energy use is the off shoring of manufacturing to countries like China. Part of the huge growth of energy use in China is due to the energy used for manufacturing products for us to buy, so that energy really ought to show up on our account. The NRDC report doesn’t mention this, either.
For example, here’s an article by George Monbiot, arguing that a major chunk of the UK’s reductions in energy use have simply been offshored.
http://www.monbiot.com/2010/05/05/carbon-graveyard/
I think it’s probably fair to say that Lovins got more predictions wrong than right. Vaclav Smil has written some savage criticisms of Lovins’ work. Mind you, when it comes to making long-term predictions about energy use, nearly everyone is soon shown to be a fool by reality.
Right, it’s pretty important to remember that an enormous chunk of U.S. manufacturing has moved to other countries.
Andy and Jim raise an important point when they speak of the “offshoring” of energy consumption from the west to the east—-remember also the proportion of that energy that is produced by burning fossil fuels.
(And please don’t talk about Smil “savagely criticizing” anyone. Is he not a climate change denier with about as much credibility as Lord Monckton?).
A more up to date Monbiot article
http://www.monbiot.com/2013/04/12/the-great-unmentionable/
And an animation with a Monbiot voice over
http://carbonomissions.org.uk
Folks, look at the US debt – sorry, no miracle,
best,
Alex
Yes, Alex, let’s look at the US debt, even though it is not very relevant to the discussion about the amount of energy needed to create each dollar of GDP (which is a bit of an apples and oranges thing anyway, since BTU’s and $$$ measure different things).
The debt is mainly the result of Republican tax cuts for the rich, and has resulted in a transfer of wealth from the 99% to the !%, since very little of it has “trickled down” and the income and wealth inequality gap in the US is as big as it has ever been and getting worse. Peter can be taken to task for talking about energy efficiency leading to “prosperity”. Prosperity for whom?—certainly not the country at large.
You need to try to focus on the point of this post—that the US is becoming ever more energy efficient. Thank goodness for that. Of course, that doesn’t mean that energy COST per dollar of GDP has necessarily declined all that much—-since fossil fuel energy is relatively more expensive nowadays. And the “prosperity” (profits) of many corporations has been passed on mainly to the corporate oligarchy via salaries, and via dividends to the plutocrats who own most of the stock, rather than to the workers or the society at large, but that’s another argument.
Private debt is far more important than public debt in this matter. Total debt is a good indicator, too. This has provided the means of increasing GDP in the U.S. despite stagnant incomes and rising cost-of-living for the vast majority.
But, I think Andy via Monbiot nailed a big factor, too – offshoring. A lot of the total U.S. (and developed countries) energy consumption was taken out with the move of manufacturing from the OECD to developing countries – and a lot of this started in the mid-1970s, too.
Your point is a side issue (but very important) – if GDP has increased so much from the mid-1970s, where the bleepity bleep has that money gone? Because the average American is no better off now than the Brady Bunch – in many cases, it’s worse. You have the answer – it’s been filtered up.
I think what Alex means, is that energy use might have gone down, but the only (or main) reason GDP has gone up, is because of debt. If you take debt out of the equation, the Energy/GDP ratio looks a lot different.
GDP, or the way it is defined at the moment (perpetual growth as end, rather than means), is the root cause of AGW and all other global crises.
Neven,
exactly – plus the fact that debt basically means “cheaper today – more expensive tomorrow”.
So what we did with debt – we tried to avoid paying more for energy with and idea, that we will pay later. Not to mention the fact, that to pay all debt requires (exponential) growth. As you say – the root cause of climate change (and other environmental problems)…
and well – another unintended consequence of going into debt is growing wealth ineaquality, which is happening world wide, not only in US, unfortunately…
best,
Alex
If you factor debt out of the equation for GDP, then it’s only fair that you factor debt out of the equation for energy consumption also. It takes a lot of energy to support goods and services. If no one can afford as much goods and services then less are made for the former, and less is achieved for the latter, and thus the energy consumed in creating, achieving and purchasing them also goes down. In short, without debt, energy consumption also is forced downward.
“Your point is a side issue (but very important) – if GDP has increased so much from the mid-1970s, where the bleepity bleep has that money gone?”
The financial sector has grown like a beast whose appetite has increased by what it is fed on. Investment banking, derivatives, etc. Bank of America, even 4 years after 2008, lists its total assets at $2,209,974,000,000 for the year 2012 (granted the Fed is propping that up to an unknown degree). And that’s just one bank. Our financial sector, last i heard, was overly out of proportion to the other sectors of the economy, especially when you compare its weight to what it used to be, decades ago.
No doubt efficiency has some claim to the above chart. But the mid-1970s also coincide with massive increases in U.S. private debt and the rise in financialization in the U.S. economy. It’s seriously hard to find studies on this issue, but here is a chart on U.S. debt as compared to GDP:
http://blogs.reuters.com/rolfe-winkler/files/2009/11/public-and-private-debt-burden.jpg
Anyway, a look at GDP in America is like a look into Pandora’s box. Nobody really wants to do it. It does seem that in developed countries, per capita energy consumption does level off (efficiency measures, yes, but it’s also that each person only really needs ‘blank’ much energy, anyway), but GDP continues to rise. Why?
Efficiency measures are absolutely vital, but I don’t think they are unlikely to be the total of what we’re seeing in the separation of GDP and energy consumption in the U.S.
On energy consumption versus GDP, it’s good to look at the world, too. The EIA shows some disturbing analysis as to what world energy usage will be like over the next several decades, and it isn’t pretty:
http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/ieo/world.cfm
I think the last few years are explained better by a drop in usage (increased strain on average American’s budget) as opposed to technological efficiencies.
Gail Tverberg is one person who does look at these issues in a rigorous manner. I’d love to quote more academic studies, but I have a hard time finding them.
http://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/11/15/is-it-really-possible-to-decouple-gdp-growth-from-energy-growth/
http://ourfiniteworld.com/2012/03/12/world-energy-consumption-since-1820-in-charts/
Don’t get too excited – as Andy said earlier, out sourcing just exports the problem and as jimbills mentioned- Gail Tverberg is the first to mention that efficiencies do make a stunning impact initially but after that there are fewer to be made.
The US motorist could eventually switch to European style motoring and smaller cars with twice the MPG but after that savings are restricted. The US cannot replace the car with cycles and public transport outside of cities because of it’s suburbs and even if it wished the carbon cost of building infrastructure would possibly counter-productive.
Poverty is pretty effective at reducing emissions as well as economic collapse [as seen after the Soviet fall]. In the UK the higher than inflation fuel rises has seen motoring fall 20% since 2008. Natural gas prices are inflating 5% above inflation and about 6% faster than income – people are taking insulation seriously but our Victorian [Edwardian, inter-war, post war and 60s] housing stock is difficult to get to a reasonable standard.
The US has the cheapest electricity /natural gas / and gasoline in OECD nations and until they start reflecting real world costs the US addiction to energy that is twice that of a European will continual.
The really great thing is the opportunity for renewables given it’s wide geography.
I think it was Lovins that said all we need to do is decouple GDP from energy use at a rate of 2% per year to stabilize global warming. We’re already doing that at a rate of 1% (possibly he meant just the US, which then falls prey to the outsourcing argument).
As mentioned by others here GDP is a poor guide – the increase in diabetes [caused by over consumption] will push up GDP [in treatment, drug sales etc], car crashes increase GDP and it is true that all that debt has artificial ‘created’ growth with pretty poor returns on the investment.
Part 1 of 2.
I found a great big blind spot in this video, a blind spot shared by Lovins and so many others. To put it succinctly:
Once you’ve reaped all the benefits of efficiency, where DOES your remaining energy come from? Can it stabilize the carbon content of the atmosphere, let alone reduce it to the 350 ppm where we need it to be?
And there’s another gotcha: investments in efficiency, whether they are electric vehicles or foam insulating board, themselves require energy. You have to build these things, not with the efficiencies you’ll have when you’re done, but with the efficiencies you have now. Further, to base an economy on wind and solar you need investments not just in efficiency, but in energy storage on a scale of gigatons of high explosive.
“Unprecedented” is inadequate to describe the scale of what must be done to create the world the Greens are promising. Like the natural services provided by oceans and forests and swamps, the scale and even the nature of the benefits humanity has derived from fossil fuels are barely understood (if at all) by most Greens. But nature doesn’t care how well you understand something; the laws of physics do not grade on a curve. You either get it right or you fail.
Andy Skuce is right: we’ve been offshoring the most carbon-intensive parts of the world economy. The Keeling Curve does not lie; while the G20 have been reducing their energy consumption and carbon emissions, the world as a whole is burning fossil carbon at a steeply accelerating rate. The USA and Europe could vanish from the face of the earth tomorrow, and Chindia could still blow the climate to hell all by themselves (and probably would).
This goes along with what jimbills calls the “financialization” of the US economy. The FIRE sectors (Financial, Insurance & Real Estate) do not create anything. They do not build a single house, lay one foot of pavement or generate one watt of electricity. Whatever they do that’s counted in “GDP”, their only contribution to energy consumption is what they allow those involved to buy from other sectors. Some of that will be sourced overseas, and not counted in domestic consumption figures. However, every molecule of GHGs winds up in our common atmosphere.
That gives you a thumbnail sketch of the problem. Part 2 proposes a solution.
Very well put, E-P. You DO understand. I was a signatory to an anti-nuclear power letter published as full page ads in the WashPost and other major papers back in the 1970’s, but have now come 180 degrees around with Hansen and others, and support nuclear power until we can increase renewables and get carbon under control.
Put on your engineer hat and do the math about exponential human population growth and the resulting resource depletion and environmental degradation. Might one conclude that it’s likely too late for the human species? Or that it will become too late before humans ever get it together and really work globally to reverse what seems inevitable?
It may take a few hundred years for the end to come, but this dumboldguy’s reading of events since WW2 has him very discouraged. As Hansen said, the “storms of my grandchildren” are brewing, and we are not doing enough to hold them off.
Part 2 of 2.
Any true solution has to recognize 4 things:
1. Globalization (governmental arbitrage, “race to the bottom”) is an enemy of the earth. To bring carbon emissions under control, those products and activities which involve or involved carbon emissions must be re-patriated. Instead of displacing dirty operations to other countries, they must be brought back to our shores and under our laws. That’s the only way to guarantee they’re cleaned up. We must also cease buying things from countries which fail to follow suit, and not lend money to them or otherwise enable their polluting activities.
2. Immigration is also an enemy of the earth. People cannot be allowed to swamp countries which have managed to produce a high standard of living with acceptable emissions and destroy the gains those countries have made, else there’s no reason to work to create them. People must live with the consequences of their nation’s actions.
3. Efficiency alone cannot do the job. Saving 50% is good, but cutting carbon emissions 50% won’t do when you need 80% cuts or even net absorption. Needless to say, the 20% cuts Dow has achieved fall woefully short of what is required overall.
4. Energy consumption per se is not a problem; only pollution, including GHG emission, is a problem. To the climate, it barely matters how much energy you consume so long as it (a) doesn’t deprive natural systems, and (b) doesn’t emit greenhouse gases. (At some staggeringly large level, waste heat affects the climate directly. We’re at least an order of magnitude away from that, and cutting heat emissions reduces its effects instantly.)
Elements (1) and (2) implicate policy, not technology. But (3) and (4) are addressable by technology alone. And guess what? The technology which deals with them most directly is that which generates carbon-free energy on demand… and that is nuclear fission. Dow Chemical itself once contracted to obtain large amounts of its energy for the Midland plant from fission. That effort fell afoul of botched (or fraudulent) construction, but human foibles do not change physics.
The truth of the matter is that Dow’s Midland plant would have reduced its carbon emissions by far more than 20% if it was getting its process steam from the abandoned nuclear reactors instead of today’s gas-fired Midland Cogeneration Venture. In the late 60’s it was projected that the USA would get most of its electricity from fission because it was cheaper than coal. That too changed due to a change in policy; nuclear energy was held to a much more strict standard of safety than energy from coal, oil and gas. That standard decreased our overall safety, and pushed the USA and the world to much higher carbon emissions. That double standard is THE problem.
Had the USA and the rest of the industrialized and industrializing world gone the way of Ontario and France, our carbon emissions per kWh of electricity would be minuscule and prices would be stable and likely falling. Nobody would be talking about “coal-burning cars” when you mentioned EVs; instead, they’d be the obvious thing to add demand in the overnight hours and increase the fraction of low-cost, zero-carbon baseload generation. We’d also have gotten rid of a lot of other hazards to life and health, like collisions involving coal trains.
Instead, what we have in the USA (and many other places) is political and regulatory persecution of the entire nuclear industry, and the false dilemma between industry and climate is being pushed even harder.
I agree about globalization, although I think globalization is just a symptom of cultural attitudes (that everything is fair game in making money, regardless of the societal costs).
I think your statements about immigration are both vaguely racist and historically wrong. I myself an am immigrant (my g-g-g-g-g-g-g-great-grandparents came to the United States from England to help wipe out and subjugate native peoples and to enslave and forcibly migrate others). Our great gains as a nation more than partially come from this massive theft and kidnapping. Our current high standard of living is more than partially funded by continued economic (and sometimes military) subjugation of other countries and peoples. But, it’s ours ours ours – not those dirty, swampy foreigners!
Beyond that, my English ancestors immigrated from the European mainland. Those ancestors immigrated from Eurasia. Those ancestors immigrated from Africa. Immigration is a part of humanity and always will be.
But….current immigration is ALSO a symptom of the cultural assumption that everything is fair game in making money. Immigrants come to the developed countries for work, and businesses hire them. I think it’s hilarious when Republicans bash immigration with one hand and decry regulation on the other. Stop the corporate influence over government, crack down on hiring, and watch as immigration becomes a non-factor.
On efficiency, yes. Efficiency alone will not save us. I doubt Peter really says that in posting stuff like this, though.
On energy consumption, I disagree. The level of energy consumption ALLOWS all the other types of economic activity that contribute to pollution/resource extraction. Different types of energy production do emit more/less GG pollution, though.
Nuclear deserves a second comment.
I like the passion that nuclear fans have, but could you answer the following concerns that I have:
1) Waste storage. No one wants it, and it’s a problem right now with low levels of nuclear production. What happens if it’s massively scaled-up globally?
2) Accidents. I always hear about how nuclear is so safe and so clean. And yet, every few years we hear of another problem:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_nuclear_accidents
Again, this is with a low level of global production. What happens when it’s scaled up? I know, Fukushima was a fluke, Chernobyl was a fluke, Three Mile was a fluke. But I’m sure Enbridge tells its investors every quarter, “Guys, it won’t happen again”.
3) Supply of uranium. Just like fossil fuels, uranium has a finite supply. Here’s an article addressing it:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last
Which says we have 200 years – at CURRENT usage. But if we massively scaled up usage, what happens then?
4) Why are countries that once were so committed to nuclear (Germany, Japan) now so against it?
The TL;DR summary is that nuclear is around 20% of US electric generation, and similar amounts of waste have been no problem for countries like France; the difference isn’t technology, but politics. Since Rod Adams has done a far better job of describing the ins and outs of the issue than I ever could, I’ll just direct you here for the long answers. One of the twists is that US nuclear conglomerate Exelon would have to write a $1 billion check to the DOE if Yucca Mountain opened. Exelon has good reason to have the problem “unsolved”, because it’s getting paid to keep spent fuel in dry casks and can invest that $1 billion itself.
Also, it’s quite untrue that no one wants spent nuclear fuel. The people in Nye county NV badly want Yucca Mountain to open, and I would be happy to take a few kilograms of Sr-90 off the government’s hands if they’d package it to my specs. I would dearly love to have a multi-kilowatt heat source good for the rest of my life. Technetium in particular is a platinum-group metal, and I understand it may have industrial applications.
All hype and FUD. Have you noticed that the only fatalities you’ve ever heard of in these things happened in the old Soviet Union nearly 3 decades ago? What would YOU rather live next to: a nuclear plant, an oil refinery, an ammonium nitrate plant, or a rail line carrying tanker cars of crude oil? People have paid with their lives for being too close to the last 3, but no nuclear plant outside the Soviet Union has ever caused a radiation-related injury beyond the fence.
Even natural gas processing plants have air emissions that make people sick. “Renewables” rely on natural gas for backup, and more gas production means people are less safe. More nuclear power is safer than less.
Not particularly. The “limited” supply is of U-235, which supplies the bulk of the energy in light-water reactors using uranium fuel. However, fast-neutron reactors can breed U-238 to fissile plutonium, which instantly multiplies the fuel supply by 140; the USA is sitting on nearly half a million tons of the stuff as “tailings” from enrichment, and another 60 thousand or so in spent fuel. Then there’s thorium, 3-4 times as abundant as uranium.
Low-enriched uranium costs about 0.7¢/kWh. Raw uranium costs about $50/lb on the spot market. It costs about $150/lb to access the billion tons of uranium in the oceans, which might push the cost of LEU up to 1.5¢/kWh. If you use fast breeders you slash the amount required to serve all human power consumption down to a mere 5000 tons per year (making uranium cost insignificant), while the world’s rivers annually contribute 30,000 tons. Fast breeders turn uranium into a truly renewable resource, more renewable than phosphate and potash.
Because of a roughly 50-year campaign of disinformation and demonization. There are people who still believe that nuclear reactors can explode like nuclear bombs. The paranoia is so thick that “nuclear magnetic resonance” scanners had to be re-named “magnetic resonance imaging”, because the word “nuclear” is toxic.
Watch “Pandora’s Promise” for a few stories from prominent anti-nukes who saw through the FUD.
Mmm. Well, you clearly know and care a lot about the subject. I don’t doubt there is a lot of misinformation about nuclear power. If one assumes that fossil fuel interests would actively engage in misinformation about renewables then it’s logical to assume the same has taken place with nuclear.
But, really, any look at nuclear has to account for Chernobyl and Fukushima. Japan and Germany haven’t decided to drop nuclear out of the blue because of a 50-year misinformation campaign. They did it (at enormous cost) because of Fukushima. It doesn’t matter if no one has directly died from it (yet) – there are countless cases of radiation leakage, and the whole area is completely unusable for possibly generations.
It’s pretty amazing to call Fukushima and Chernobyl “hype”.
I’m not particularly against nuclear – especially fast breeders and thorium. I’m against humans overdrawing on the environmental bank account – which we’re doing to a gross degree. I don’t really see nuclear in any form solving that.
“What would YOU rather live next to: a nuclear plant, an oil refinery, an ammonium nitrate plant, or a rail line carrying tanker cars of crude oil?”
None of the above. I’d rather have no electricity of any kind – or maybe four solar panels to run a handful of light bulbs and a fan, a solar hot water heater for a shower, use passive heat design in a home’s architecture, and live next to a pond full of fish that don’t have some type of chemical poisoning. I’d rather walk to work and chat with my neighbors while I’m doing so.
I know we don’t live in that world. We live in this ugly behemoth world where people kill each other over sneakers, run over bicyclists because they’re annoying, buy plastic crap at fluorescent-filled palaces, burn out their brains watching the most insane drivel, work to the bone to pay for it all, and take Prozac because they can’t freaking stand it.
Yay for us.
My 2-part reply to you is re-parented here for readability.